


Ere Babylon Was Dust

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, The Year Without A Summer, capital R-Romanticism, doom and gloom, geneva 1816, various historical figures - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:06:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27418498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: They thought the sun was dying.Yusuf took it the hardest.OR, the Year Without a Summer.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 90
Kudos: 386





	Ere Babylon Was Dust

They thought the sun was dying.

The temperature dropped. There were snowfalls in June, dry fogs, streaky sunsets, and unseasonal storms. Europe, ravaged by decades of Napoleonic wars, was now being battered by nature. Germans were reduced to eating sawdust bread; famine refugees streamed out of Ireland and Wales. As cattle died and harvests failed, food riots broke out everywhere, and street-corner prophets predicted all manner of doom.

Later they would learn that the endless winter of 1816 had been caused by a faraway volcanic explosion on the Indonesian archipelago: Mount Tambora had lost its head, incinerating ten thousand people on the spot, and another hundred thousand across the world perished from crop failures, famine, and disease. Countless tons of volcanic ash circulated in the stratosphere, blotting out the sun, reflecting heat and light back into space. Nobody at the time understood what was happening, of course; it wasn’t until the 1960s when scientists were able to explain the causal connections between volcanic activity and the weather.

In 1816, though, they thought the earth was moving toward an everlasting night.

Yusuf took it the hardest.

Spring found them on a long, meandering journey across Europe. Their new brother Sebastien was adjusting poorly to his circumstances, so Andromache had deemed it advisable to keep him off French soil for the time being. (“Some days,” Nicolò confided, “I am not sure if Sebastien is our comrade or our prisoner.”) They traveled eastward across muddy Flanders, passing through Waterloo again. Yusuf recalled a field so drenched in blood that it had appeared completely flooded with it: fifteen thousand British soldiers had died there, taking with them twice as many French. Ten months on, the feculent mulch nourished a sea of innocuous green—tilled, sown, and restored to the sovereignty of rye and barley.

He and Nicolò were appalled to discover the battlefield had become a site of pilgrimage for British tourists. Not just carriage-loads of pleasure-trippers, miscellaneous Johnsons, Robertses, Davises, and Jacksons, but also the likes of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey, all eager to commune with the spirit of the place that had presided over Napoleon’s last stand. The looting of the battlefield had been extraordinarily rapid, and now merchants hawked helmets, hats, pistols, cannonballs, bullets, insignia, and the books and letters of the dead. Even teeth, and severed fingers preserved in bottles of gin—Yusuf saw Nico’s eyes flash and hastily dragged him away from the grisly marketplace.

They didn’t linger, but Yusuf found himself dwelling on that blood-soaked battlefield, now grassed over with promiscuous grain. It sank him into a strange and contemplative mood.

There was something to be said about the impermanence of all things discarded in an empire’s dust, he thought. His imagination stirred with a dilating sense of history and place, the past lying thick and sedimentary around him. There was no such thing as a silent ruin; each tombstone and battlefield was a testament to the feats attainable under the force of the human will—and a fingerpost pointing toward their inescapable futility. The air was gravid with restless ghosts, the men and women they had known during the French Revolution, those who had lost their heads to Madame La Guillotine, and all those who had died since.

And above them all glowered the Corsican shade, Napoleon Bonaparte: proud, ambitious, and emotionally isolate, the thunderbolts wrung from his hand—or so Yusuf wrote in one of his unfinished verses. (His poems in those days were frequently about departure and rarely about arrival; Nico said it was little wonder that he never managed to complete them.)

On their stolen Cossack steeds they traveled through towns and villages that became steadily more ruinous with every passing mile, the roads so sandy and rutted that their horses were constantly throwing shoes. Outside Battice, a flock of ragged children darted alongside them, the girls begging for a sou and hailing Andromache, who rode at the head of their column dressed as a man, as “Monsieur le Genéral en chef.” “Vive l’Angleterre!” called the boys, “Vive Lord Wellington et cela pour Napoleon”— _cela_ was accompanied by a thumb drawn sharply across the throat. Nicolò emptied his pockets for them, face pinched. 

March to turned to April, and April to May. The skies were dark, the winds tenacious. Yusuf fucking hated Europe. 

Crossing an invisible frontier, they entered the dominions of Frederick William III, King of Prussia, though the change did little to alleviate the squalor. They rode through basalt-paved streets given over to dogs and thistles, lined with mouldering churches recommissioned as warehouses and empty convents turned into barracks for Prussian troops. In the spa town of Aix-la-Chapelle, Yusuf asked a local boy the way to the mineral baths and was led straight to a brothel. (“Thank god,” said Sebastien. “I need a bottle, and a whore whose politics can be trusted. Care to join me?”)

All travelers were under surveillance in post-Napoleonic Europe, but Englishmen passed more easily through checkpoints. Sebastien had forged them all very convincing papers; however, only Andromache and Yusuf spoke the language well enough for the ruse to be a persuasive one. Sebastien spoke no English at all, and Nicolò had developed a sort of allergy to it—never was he more Italian than when he spoke English. Consequently, Andromache and Yusuf did all the talking with gendarmes and innkeepers, while Nico and Sebastien lurked in the background, menacing and mute.

The inns south of Cologne proved to be some of the most inhospitable in Europe. Having checked in, they would be met with mysterious tariffs as changeable as desert sands and housed in spartan rooms where the bedsheets were damp, curtains an unknown luxury, and a request for soap was met with a hard stare for all save the especially persistent, for whom a small, gelatinous blob might make its way grudgingly from the kitchen.

Yusuf always persisted: he prized cleanliness and had taught Nicolò to do the same in the early years of their acquaintance. In their room, he scrubbed sweat and road dust from Nico’s hair and kissed the side of his neck. “I want you,” he murmured, hand straying lower, but Nico merely sighed and trapped the wandering hand against his stomach. “Better not risk it, love. Sebastien will be back soon.”

But Sebastien never came back at all that night, and in the morning they were woken by shouts from the hall. It was the innkeeper, swearing like a squadron of cavalry: he thought Sebastien was in bed with his wife. As it turned out, Sebastien—when they located him—was in bed with one of the chambermaids, “whose red cheeks and white teeth,” he explained to an unimpressed Andromache, “had me venture upon her carnally.” (Though he spoke frequently and tearfully of a wife, Sebastien was diligently fucking his way across Europe on a whim, leaving the rest of them to settle his debts with vexed whores whom he had neglected to compensate for their services.)

The Lausanne road carried them down to the basin of Lac Léman, as Lake Geneva was locally known. When the wild mountains gave way to dark woods of spruce, fir, and juniper, Andromache decided they had traveled far enough. They rented a dilapidated two-storey villa near the lake, hidden from the road and separated from the water by an overgrown garden of trees. Yusuf hoped it would provide them with the sanctuary they needed to rest and recuperate from Napoleon’s wars—and to finally make their morose and quarrelsome new sibling a proper member of the family.

There were only two difficulties.

The first difficulty was the neighbors.

Less than a week after they arrived, Sebastien received a terrible fright when he saw Napoleon’s enormous coach lumbering down the road. He was convinced that Bonaparte had escaped from his island prison on Saint Helena and come to reclaim his lost empire. As it turned out, the coach was merely a replica and belonged to the notorious poet Lord Byron, who had recently fled England garlanded with an unholy trinity of scandal—debt, incest, and sodomy.

To Andromache’s irritation, Byron took up residence at a luxurious lakeside villa only a few miles west of their own lodgings. Shortly thereafter, the nearly-as-notorious poet Shelley also installed himself nearby, along with his common-law wife Mary and her stepsister. This whiff of celebrity set Andromache’s teeth on edge, and she insisted they avoid all contact with the Byron-Shelley ménage. “I mean it, no social calls,” she said sternly, singling out Yusuf with her eyes. “I know you enjoy poets, but those English people are trouble.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Yusuf replied blithely, though he was a bit curious about Shelley, who was the author of a provocative pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism” that Yusuf would have very much liked to debate him on.

“Make yourself useful and teach Sebastien how to throw a punch. And you—” she rounded on Nicolò—“show him how to aim a gun, because that Frenchman couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if his life depended on it.”

“The last time I ventured a suggestion,” Nicolò said dryly, “Sebastien told me exactly where I might stick my gun, then expressed concern there would not be room for it, if Yusuf’s cock were already up there.”

Yusuf bristled.

“What are you saying?” Sebastien demanded, roused from his alcoholic stupor. “Are you talking about me?”

The second difficulty was the weather.

Summer was yet to arrive in Geneva, and by mid-June, it seemed like it never would. “Such stupid mists, fogs, rains,” Yusuf complained to Nicolò; he felt as if the cold and damp of Britain had followed them all the way to Switzerland. Nicolò looked at him pensively and asked if he did not think that the cold and damp of Britain had been following them ever since they had lost Quynh there almost three hundred years ago.

It was a sobering thought.

Thick snows lingered on the lower slopes of the Jura, and though Nico had high hopes of indulging his lifelong passion for boats on Lac Léman, the skies had quickened to a thunderous black, and perpetual rains were punctuated by vast, orchestral storms that they watched roll over the mountains from the windows of the saloon, streaking the lake with lightning. 

The weather forestalled Andromache’s plans to bring Sebastien’s laughably poor military training up to par. Instead, they were trapped indoors: Andromache paced, Sebastien drank, Nicolò read a stack of books in half a dozen languages, and Yusuf wrote desultory little poems in the margins of his sketchbook:

_What if suns & stars & Earth  
_ _Which seem exempt from death & birth—  
_ _If all things brightest, firmest, best—  
_ _Are but ~~deceits~~ ~~visions~~ shadows… _

Over the weeks that followed, the rain caused both the lake and the Rhône to rise, creeping inland and destroying crops, forcing the local magistrates to prohibit the baking of white bread. A soup kitchen opened for the poor, and Nicolò quietly returned to his earliest calling and spent long hours there, ministering to the hungry.

Left to his own devices, Yusuf brooded.

In the scientific journals, astronomers blamed the downpour on an ailing sun, specifically two mysterious sunspots that could be seen with the naked eye. Yusuf observed them uneasily through smoked glasses; he’d read that a chunk might shear off the weakened disc and incinerate the earth.

If there was no longer an earth—what would become of _them_?

He wanted to discuss the matter with Nico, but Nico was not at home. He considered praying, but his thoughts were too scattered, and without niyyah there could be no salah, so he gave it up as a bad job. Then he encountered Andromache and made the mistake of sharing his concerns with her. Andromache laughed and expressed her sincere hope that the sun would expire sooner rather than later and put an end to this rotten bitch of a life. She laughed, but there was no humor in it, and when she clapped him on the shoulder and sauntered off into the mist, he was left feeling worse than ever.

Restless and agitated, he went inside and rifled through the stack of books Nicolò had left on the table. Goethe’s _Faust_ —Nico had finished it the previous night and pronounced it the finest thing to come out of Europe since Shakespeare. A King James Bible in English—some whim sent Yusuf flipping to the back pages, to the Book of Revelation. Revelation had been the source of many of Nicolò’s more hysterical ideas back in the eleventh century. Yusuf had laughed at the time—what nonsense the Christian barbarians used, to frighten their children—but he was less amused today: _The fourth angel poured out his vial on the sun, and men were scorched with great heat… and the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast, and his kingdom was full of darkness… and there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings. And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found…_

Yusuf did not want the planet to perish; he was terrified of being doused by darkness. He knew these fears were selfish. He had lived for seven and a half centuries with the love of his life by his side for most of them. He had experienced love most extraordinary: longevity had only amplified the intensity of what he shared with Nicolò, and the two of them had known unparalleled friendship and camaraderie with Andromache and Quynh. And now they had a new brother, Sebastien—surely destiny would not have seen fit to introduce a new member to their ranks, only for the world to end a few years later? 

He had no right to crave more life, not for his own sake. But as he huddled by the fireplace, clutching a blanket around his shoulders, Yusuf was gripped with a mad desire to turn the time around. To grab Nicolò by the hand and flee with him, to outpace the gathering darkness…

But when Nico returned from the soup kitchen, he looked so weary that Yusuf decided not to mention the dying sun. He brewed them a pair of hot toddies, and they sat before the fire, facing each other with their legs interlocked.

“Have you begun _Faust_ yet?” Nico inquired. He had dark smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, but Yusuf was glad to see the toddy had brightened his cheeks a bit.

“I got distracted,” he admitted, reaching out to cradle Nicolò’s face between his palms. “This fucking weather, I can’t concentrate on anything.” He leaned closer and brushed his lips over Nicolò’s chapped ones. “Anything except you, Nico.” 

Sebastien cleared his throat.

Yusuf sighed. “Yes, brother?”

Yusuf had offered Sebastien a toddy and suggested that he join them, but the Frenchman had declined. He had taken his brandy neat and installed himself in the drafty far corner of the saloon, from whence he glowered at them with Gallic disapproval and periodically cleared his throat to register his displeasure. After nearly four years of this, Yusuf was at a loss. _Nicolò is everything to me_ , he had explained. _We belong to each other, we share one soul._ But Sebastien balked. At the best of times, he was baffled by them; at the worst of times, he treated their relationship like a personal affront. 

Antagonized, Yusuf’s desire for Nicolò burned hot and a little ugly. He wanted to crawl between his legs and go down on him, right there under Sebastien’s hostile gaze. Nico would never permit it, of course—not to prove a point—and Yusuf felt ashamed of his thoughts. He disliked this tendency in himself, how every instinct for harmony or self-preservation went out the fucking window when he perceived some slight to their relationship. It was always getting him into trouble; he hadn’t a fraction of Nicolò’s self-possession.

Sebastien cleared his throat again, and Yusuf ground his teeth—

Nico rolled to his feet in a fluid, graceful movement and extended his hand to Yusuf. He tilted his head at the window. _Come_ , his eyes said. _I would rather be caught in the rain than endure another minute of this._

They put on their coats and ventured outdoors, where it was predictably cold and damp, storm clouds gathering to the north. But they could hold hands as they strolled along the pebbled shoreline, and stop to kiss whenever the fancy struck them. Nicolò’s eyes gleamed silver in the half-light. Yusuf thought what it a terrible thing it was, that the sun would die and then _they_ would die and never more would he be able to look upon the shifting hypnotic eyes of his beloved.

“I think that’s a boathouse up ahead,” Nico remarked.

Yusuf all but dragged him inside.

The boathouse was a solid wooden structure, quite empty, the interior miraculously dry. Yusuf spread their coats on the ground to make a sort of nest, and Nico curled into him like an oversized cat, resting his head on Yusuf’s thigh. Yusuf carded his fingers through Nico’s damp hair and leaned down to kiss him, savoring the powerful heat of his mouth, such a contrast to the clammy chill on their skin. There was a hint of stubble, hardly anything really, because Nico was meticulous in his shaving habits these days, but the faint scratch was enough to send a sharp, hungry pang through his chest.

He tugged haphazardly at Nico’s clothing, demanding access to what lay beneath. The perfect knit of his collarbone, the astonishing breadth of a shoulder that was still winter-pale at the end of June, because there had been no sunshine—

“Slow down, my love,” Nico chided, after Yusuf had torn open his collar and bared his chest to an onslaught of stinging kisses. “We have time. Now that we’re alone,” he added, with a ripple of amusement, and Yusuf squirmed. His uglier thoughts were no secret to Nicolò, who read them easily and went on loving him, whether he deserved it or no. He wanted to cover every inch of that lithe, sinewy body with kisses. He caught a nipple between his teeth and bit down a little too hard; Nico cursed him and executed a swift rolling maneuver, pinning him to the ground.

“Yusuf,” he said sternly.

Yusuf could grapple his way out, if he wanted. He was stronger than Nicolò. In close quarters, his strength won out over Nicolò’s almost preternatural speed. If he wished it, he could goad Nicolò into a rough, unsentimental fuck on the packed dirt floor of the boathouse. But then Nico dipped down and kissed him sweetly, and the sharpness in his chest eased into something hot and molten. 

They rearranged themselves. Nico sat against the wall and Yusuf sat between his legs, head tilted back to rest on Nico’s broad shoulder. Every time he drew breath, Yusuf felt his head move up and down, as though on a slow sea, and he could hear Nicolò’s heartbeat, feel the heat of him through his open shirt. His mouth felt red and scorched from kissing, and he could feel the hard length of Nico’s cock pressed against the small of his back.

“I want to tell you about _Faust_ ,” Nicolò said unexpectedly.

“Oh yes?” He arched his spine and rubbed against that enticing hardness.

Nico’s breath quickened, but the timber of his voice was unchanged, low and soothing. “I know you would enjoy it, my love. It’s the story of a scholar who sells his soul to a devil called Mephistopheles in exchange for divine knowledge and immortal life.” Nico’s clever hands began to move, touching, caressing, tweaking, undoing buttons. “Faust, the scholar, bids the devil to help him seduce a girl called Gretchen, but then he forgets all about poor Gretchen to go on adventures with the devil instead.” His fingers found the fastenings of Yusuf’s trousers, nimbly undoing them, then pushing the fabric down his thighs. Yusuf hissed at the sting of cool air on overheated flesh.

“Odd sort of bargain,” he rasped.

Nico took hold of him then, and Yusuf lost the thread of the conversation, entranced as ever by the sight of Nico’s hands on him, the head of his cock appearing and disappearing into Nico’s fist. Nico added a wicked little twist at the upstroke, and Yusuf sighed, his eyes fluttering shut.

“Very strange,” Nicolò agreed. “Faust swears to strive with all his energies and pursue his purpose till the end of the world—if he ever stands still, then Mephistopheles may lay claim to his eternal soul.”

“Oh?” He groaned deeply, and Nico hummed in response. He paused to spit into his hand and then resumed, the pressure increasing and relaxing in a pattern carefully designed to drive Yusuf wild. He clutched at the rough material of Nico’s trousers, nails digging into hard muscle; he could picture the crescent-moon marks waxing and waning against the pale flesh of Nico’s thighs.

“Yes, and the terms are these—” Nico switched from Italian to German— “ _If ever to the moment I shall say / Beautiful moment, do not pass away / ‘Remain thou, thou art so beautiful!’ / Then you may forge your chains to bind me, / Then I will put my life behind me, / The clock may stop, the clock-hands fall, / And time shall come to an end for me!_ ”

Yusuf came hard with the end of this recitation, shooting all over Nico’s hand and his own stomach, before collapsing back to lie in Nico’s arms. “You are temptation itself,” he murmured, dazed by the intensity of it, lulled by the soft patter of rain against the roof of the boathouse. “Beautiful man—moment—do not pass away.”

Nico laughed. Yusuf marshalled his wobbly limbs and rolled over, settling between Nico’s thighs, nosing at the hardness through his trousers. “I am going to suck you,” he announced, raising his voice over a low rumble of thunder, “and you are going to come down my throat. And then if it is _still_ raining—”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry!” a female voice exclaimed.

They jolted apart. Yusuf lurched sideways, pulling up his trousers, and saw a pale-faced young woman, her form soaked and transparent, wavering like a ghost in the doorway.

“Ah—hello,” Nicolò said cautiously in English, the same language the woman had spoken in. He wiped his hand on the shirt he was rebuttoning and caught Yusuf’s eye with a little grimace. Yusuf shrugged back, _wait and see._ At least she hadn’t screamed, perhaps they could steer her away without much trouble—

“I got caught in the rain,” the apparition said, through chattering teeth. She was shivering like an autumn leaf.

They remembered their manners then, and with their clothes smoothed back into place, they sprang into action. Yusuf helped the woman over the threshold, and Nico draped his coat around her shoulders.

“What a wet, ungenial summer it has been!” the stranger said. She was drenched to the bone, and there was a feverish cast to her fine dark eyes. Yusuf suspected that she was coming down with a chill, as mortals were wont to do in these climes. “I should have known better than to go out, but one grows so tired of being confined to the house.”

Yusuf nodded. He was braced for hostilities, never mind her amiable chatter about the weather, and he wished to shuffle this along, so that he might return to the pressing business of sucking Nico off.

“The thunderstorms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before,” the young woman went on, drawing Nico’s coat more closely around her. “Thank you for the coat, I’m sorry I’ve gotten it wet. My name is Mary. Mary Shelley is my name to-be, but—well, it’s all a bit complicated, really.”

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Nico said, shooting Yusuf an amused little glance.

“It certainly is!” Yusuf agreed. Though cocksucking was still very much on his mind, he was pleased with this turn of events. Andromache had said _no social calls_ , but she could hardly fault them for a chance meeting in a storm. Mary Shelley-to-be had a fine command of French, so in order to spare Nico the annoyance of further conversation in English, they introduced themselves as Josef and Nicolas, lately of Liège, and Mary Shelley-to-be said she was very glad to meet them. She made no mention of the manner in which she had discovered them, and Yusuf would have liked her for that alone, but when she displayed a quick wit and reeled off the titles of all the books she was reading, he found himself liking her very much indeed. Nicolò, he could tell, was similarly charmed.

Mary said she was thinking of learning German in order to read _Faust_ , since no English translation was yet available, and Nicolò encouraged her in this pursuit. Yusuf wondered aloud what it was about this novel that had so possessed everyone; Nico informed him that it was actually a verse drama and he would understand once he’d read it.

There was another, louder, rumble of thunder.

“At Byron’s villa, we sit around the fire and try to frighten each other with ghost stories,” Mary told them. “As a child, Shelley—my husband-to-be—used to conduct experiments in galvanism, and when I suggested the reanimation of a human corpse might be possible using similar methods, Byron said I had quite spoiled his supper. Byron doesn’t care for the company of women outside the bedroom. He and Shelley have sequestered themselves all week, and…” Mary looked between them, and her expression was frankly curious now. “Shelley likes to discourse on the manners of the ancient Greeks relative to the subject of love…”

Yusuf raised one eyebrow; Nicolò coughed and started to say something about galvanism, but Mary interrupted him.

“Shelley says that Greek men loved each other because they suffered from a profound lack of desirable Greek women,” she said swiftly, two spots of color appearing high on her cheeks.

“Hmm,” said Nico.

“Greek love—” Mary began, then broke off. “Are you… practitioners of it?”

“Practitioners of Greek love?” Yusuf repeated, frowning a little. He had studied Plato’s _Symposium_ , of course, but had never thought about it in relation to Nicolò and himself. Did she mean like Socrates and Alcibiades? The idea was laughable. He and Nicolò were the same age—very old indeed—and perfect equals.

“Not in the Platonic sense, no,” said Nico.

“Or the Socratic, for that matter,” Yusuf added. “We simply… love.”

“It has nothing to do with—I mean, you do not find women unworthy, or lacking in a certain beauty or intellect?” Mary pressed.

“Not at all!” Yusuf assured her. “The contemplation of female excellence is one of the favorite foods of our imaginations.”

Nico’s mouth twitched, but he nodded agreement. 

“My love for this man is a reflection of _his_ excellence, not some perceived lack elsewhere,” Yusuf explained. 

“I see,” Mary said thoughtfully.

When the worst of the gale had passed, they offered to escort Mary back to her lodgings, and, with gratifying eagerness, she consented. But alas, it was not to be. No sooner had they ventured outside then they were met by Andromache, tall and formidable in her swirling black cloak. Yusuf expected stern remonstrances when he introduced their companion as Mrs. Mary Shelley-to-be, but instead a strange look crossed Andromache’s face. She called Mary “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley-to-be” and said that she had known her mother, a long time ago. Then she informed Yusuf and Nicolò that there was no more need for them—she would see Mrs. Shelley home herself—and marched off with a startled but not unwilling Mary in tow.

Yusuf flung up his hands and demanded to know what the fuck had just transpired. “She gave us a direct order, she said, and I quote, ‘Those English people are trouble,’ and told us to avoid them at all costs,” he complained. He’d wanted to learn more about galvanism and reanimation; he’d wanted to pass an afternoon in Mary Shelley’s stimulating company and perhaps cross paths with Percy Shelley as well, or even Lord Byron, though the latter interested him less. But instead Andromache had swooped in and—

“I think Andromache wanted Mary Shelley all to herself, my love,” Nicolò said, smiling faintly.

They hastened home under a lurid twilight. The clouds were tinted orange, like something out of a gothic nightmare. When they reached their villa, Sebastien was nowhere to be found. Not unusual; he liked to visit the taverns in Geneva. The trouble was that he would lose track of time, and when the gates to the walled city were shut at ten, he would be trapped therein, and they would not see him again till morning, when he staggered home, reeking of spirits.

Nico fell asleep directly after supper. Yusuf was tired but he was also restless, so he lit a candle and fetched Nicolò’s copy of _Faust_ from downstairs. At first he didn’t care for it. The archaic knittelvers struck him as crude. But then he got into the rhythm of it, and a few short hours later he was closing the book with trembling fingers. It was, as Nicolò had said, the finest thing to come out of Europe since Shakespeare. But all that talk of diabolical wagers and the end of time set Yusuf to thinking once more about the failing, sickly sun.

Beside him, Nicolò slept on. Yusuf studied him—the swoop of dark lashes against his cheek, a stray lock of hair tumbled across his brow, that unmistakable profile—… His beloved, in repose. The sight brought him to tears.

_If ever to the moment I shall say  
_ _Beautiful moment, do not pass away…_

Yusuf was seven hundred and fifty years old. Over the centuries, he had concluded that human time was not experienced uniformly but was controlled by the speed and intensity of impressions and ideas. The twelfth century passed in a whirl of sound and color as he and Nicolò discovered each other and fell in love; they rode time like a triumphal chariot and galloped into the future. The chariot slowed considerably in the thirteenth century, when their relationship foundered and the whole world seemed at odds with them. So it had always gone, time alternately speeding up or slowing down, depending on the circumstances. Yusuf had never wished for it to stop altogether; he simply tried to capture the beautiful moments in art and poetry so that he and Nicolò might revisit them later.

But if the sun died—if they were left in darkness—then art and poetry would be rendered meaningless. Yusuf shuddered to imagine it: an icy desolation—the earth a void, the moon expired—seasonless, treeless, manless, lifeless—oceans standing still, waves dead—stagnant air—… If that were the future, then Yusuf longed to be suspended, unthinking, and therefore unaware of the hours passing, in some spell of inspiration, or buried deep in Nicolò’s flesh, anything but the unknowable state that followed death—

“You are troubled,” Nico said.

Yusuf jumped; he hadn’t realized he was awake.

Nico had raised himself up on an elbow and was squinting at Yusuf through one half-open eye. Whatever he saw in Yusuf’s face was enough to rouse him, for he sat upright and crossed his legs. “Tell me,” he ordered.

Helpless, Yusuf did. His anguish poured out of him, the horrific vision of a sunless universe, populated with fearful imagery plucked straight from the Book of Revelation and the Surah Yunus and the Walpurgisnacht of _Faust_. Nicolò listened quietly for a time. Then he pressed his fingertips to Yusuf’s lips, hushing him.

Much, much later—after they had learned about Mount Tambora and the enormous dust cloud that had entered the atmosphere and so disastrously disrupted the weather systems, replacing the summer of 1816 with volcanic winter—Nicky would suggest to Joe that perhaps he suffered from the seasonal affective disorder, in which gloomy atmospheric conditions exercised undue influence over one’s moods. Joe would wholeheartedly cosign this diagnosis and use it as the basis from which to argue that they should restrict their activities to climates congenial to his mental health. Andy would reject this proposition outright; Booker would suggest the purchase of a heat lamp.

But all that came later. In 1816, they did not have such advanced scientific information at their disposal.

Nicolò said he did not believe the sun was dying.

Yusuf pressed him; Nico could not explain why.

“It is just a feeling that I have.”

Yusuf was not convinced; they began to argue.

Yusuf got emotional. He accused Nicolò of being steeped in eschatological time from the start—once a pilgrim, always a pilgrim—and insufficiently concerned with worldly matters. The first accusation was unjust—Islam had its own apocalyptic strain, as Yusuf well knew—and the second patently false—was it Yusuf who spent his days at the soup kitchen while Nicolò wallowed at home? (It was not.)

Nico would have been well within his rights to tell Yusuf to go and fuck himself. But he did not. Instead he tugged _Faust_ from Yusuf’s white-knuckled grip—he was, inexplicably, still clutching the book—and set it aside. “Like Faust, we must always keep striving,” he said gently. “No matter how much time we’ve got left, or how little. Otherwise this covenant that we keep, to devote our long lives to doing good—it amounts to nothing.”

“I know,” Yusuf said. He was struggling to meet Nico’s eyes. “It is a devilish kind of sickness to wish to stay forever anywhere, to crave stillness.”

Nico stroked his cheek. “If you were to say, with Faust, _verweile doch, du bist du schön_ —”

“— _remain thou, thou art so beautiful_ —” 

“—then you would be consigning yourself to death in life, as sure as if you were to live forever within the same four walls,” Nico said. The corner of his lip twitched. “And I know that you have no intention of letting some upstart Christian devil get the best of you, my darling.”

“No,” Yusuf agreed. “I am safe, because _you_ are the best of me—the best part of me—and I have entrusted my immortal soul to your safekeeping.”

Something flickered in the depths of Nicolò’s eyes. Candlelit, his face had a medieval cast; he looked regal and a little mysterious. Then he smiled—an expression of pure mischief—and shoved Yusuf back against the headboard.

Nico, it seemed, was done talking for the evening.

He divested them of their remaining clothes. Yusuf sighed appreciatively, trailing his eyes over Nicolò’s lean, rangy beauty. The proportions of him—Allah yerhamo, Yusuf thought, such splendor would be the death of him. Nothing in the world compared to Nico without his clothes on.

Nico loomed over him, kissed him slowly, then bent his head to lick one of his nipples. Yusuf arched against Nico’s mouth with an incoherent sound and tangled his fingers in his hair. Nico began kissing his way down his chest and stomach, and Yusuf suddenly recalled the assignation that had been interrupted at the boathouse.

“It occurs to me,” he said, breathlessly, “that certain business was left unfinished earlier.”

Nico looked up at him through his lashes, contemplative. “You don’t want me to suck your dismal thoughts out of you, then?”

“There are other ways of shutting me up, my love.”

“So there are.” Nico straddled Yusuf’s chest, gave himself a couple idle strokes. All the while, his eyes were intent, slightly narrowed, and Yusuf met the scrutiny as evenly as he could. He knew Nicolò was checking for cracks in his façade, and he tried to tell him, wordlessly, that it was no façade at all, no diversion. His mind was at rest, like the smooth surface of a lake.

Nico smiled. His eyes glinted. He leant forward, tracing the head of his cock around Yusuf’s lips. Yusuf licked the underside slowly and felt Nico shiver. “Open up, beloved,” he said.

Yusuf opened up obediently and sucked the head of Nico’s cock into his mouth. A tremor went through Nico’s body; he swayed precariously and gripped the headboard. Yusuf wrapped his hands around Nico’s thighs and tugged him forward a little, taking him inch by inch into his mouth.

“All the way…” Nico crooned, and Yusuf swallowed him down as deeply as he could. He was getting precisely what he wanted, a certain steeliness to Nico’s handling of him—implacable, yet unerringly gentle—the combination so arousing he nearly forgot to breathe. Nico fucked his mouth lazily, sliding almost all the way out before slowly pushing back in again. Yusuf pressed his tongue to the underside of his cock, just to hear Nico’s breathing go ragged as he knew it would.

And then Nicolò withdrew, leaving Yusuf licking his lips, feeling empty. Nico settled beside him on the bed. Kissed him softly, nibbling along his jaw and down his neck, brushing his thumbs over his nipples then down to drag fingertips along his aching cock and away again. Two oiled fingers inside him now, but shallow. All of it too gentle, too light, teasing…

“You are not allowed to die without me,” Yusuf said suddenly. Apropos of nothing and everything. “Not ever, and certainly not for good.”

“I am the keeper of your immortal soul,” Nicolò reminded him, “and you of mine. It is our fatality to live, my Yusuf.”

He wasted no further time. He rolled Yusuf onto his front, lined himself up and pushed in swiftly. Not even giving him a moment to breathe, pinning him down with long slow strokes. Yusuf could feel his orgasm starting to build already, his cock dragging against the bedclothes as Nico overpowered him with his warmth, his strength, the fierce blaze of his love.

Then Nico yanked his hips up, away from the friction of the mattress. Yusuf swore in frustration, his cock bobbing uselessly between his stomach and the bed. “At least touch me,” he gasped. “Nico…”

“Not yet,” said Nico, sweet as honey, biting his shoulder, sending an electric jolt through his body. The iron grip of Nico’s hands on his hips was unbreakable; he was unable to press his cock against anything. But Nico was fucking him in earnest now, nothing measured about it, just deep hard thrusts thudding into him, faster and faster, until Yusuf could only choke out sobbing little moans into the pillow. His mind was blissfully empty, that rarified state best achieved when Nicolò shoved him facedown into the mattress and fucked him senseless without any poetics.

He came untouched.

Nico was panting heavily, his stomach and chest slick with perspiration. He collapsed against Yusuf with low groan, and Yusuf could feel the pulsing heat of him deep within.

A few minutes later, Nico was propped on an elbow, stroking the sweat-drenched curls back from Yusuf’s forehead as he kissed him thoroughly. “Tomorrow, we shall look at the sun together through your special glasses,” he murmured against his lips. “I want to see these strange spots you describe for myself. And then I think we had better speak to Andromache about traveling further south. Pisa, perhaps. Or Livorno, to be near the sea.”

“We agreed to stay here through the summer,” Yusuf reminded him gloomily, feeling some of the heaviness creep back into his bones as Nico’s come seeped out of him.

“If the summer has no intention of coming to us in Switzerland, then I say we must ourselves travel to the summer country.” Nicolò kissed him again, and Yusuf experienced a stab of longing for the sundrenched coastline of bella Italia, the sapphire waters of the Ligurian Sea. “This place is not… congenial,” Nico added. He slipped two fingers back inside of Yusuf and stopped the leak, thumb rubbing gently along his rim. “You are unhappy here.”

“Well, the weather _is_ fucking awful,” Yusuf said, bearing down on the fingers, grateful for the renewed sense of fullness. 

“It really fucking is,” Nico agreed.

Yusuf smiled and kissed the tip of his nose. “Your beak is chapped.”

Nico gave him a wry look. 

“Such an awfully prominent target for the wind and rain.” Yusuf chuckled. “As soon as you heal, the cold chafes it raw again, my poor darling.”

“Well then,” Nico said. “Tomorrow we shall tell Andromache and Sebastien that the weather is bad for my overlarge nose, and for the sake of my vanity, we must repair southward to warmer climes.”

Yusuf grinned, and the grin turned into a great cracking yawn as a huge wave of tiredness swept over him. Nico withdrew his fingers carefully, and Yusuf made a disgruntled noise; Nico _tsk_ ed at him.

“This is what comes of staying up half the night, reading _Faust_.” Nico found a discarded shirt and used it to wipe the worst of the mess from their bodies. Then he blew out the candle, and Yusuf wrapped him up in his arms. He whispered to Nico that he loved him; Nico whispered it back and promised him the warmth of the sun.

When Yusuf shambled downstairs the next morning, he found Andromache, Nicolò, and a decidedly worse-for-wear Sebastien standing in the kitchen. Nico was oiling a revolver—an ominous sign—and Andromache was giving Sebastien a terrific dressing-down, something about putting them all at risk and endangering their livelihoods and—

“What the fuck is going on?” Yusuf demanded.

It transpired that Sebastien had _not_ passed the night in Geneva, as assumed. No, he had returned this morning and regaled Andromache and Nicolò with a wild account of a brandy and laudanum-fueled evening at the neighboring villa, where an unhinged Byron had impersonated Napoleon, recited Coleridge, and finally challenged Sebastien to a duel.

They were to depart immediately. Nicolò suggested Livorno and his suggestion was met with approval; Andromache said she did not care where the fuck they went as long as there were no famous poets in residence. Of her own evening with Mary Shelley-to-be, Andromache refused to elaborate, though Yusuf made several subtle and not-so-subtle inquiries over the course of their journey south. Yusuf sincerely regretted that he and Nicolò had not gotten to spend more time with that most fascinating young woman—and that they had never made the acquaintance of her husband-to-be, Shelley himself, and gotten to debate the principles of atheism with him.

All the while, Sebastien sank deeper into himself, surly and withdrawn, and Yusuf sensed unfinished business there, trouble ahead.

A brownish snow fell from the sky as they crossed into Italy. The flakes left a gritty, ashy residue that clung to their hair and clothes, collected in the horses’ manes. Yusuf glanced heavenward and tried not to think that an enraged natural world was hurling strange and apocalyptic signs in the direction of mankind. But then the sun burst through the clouds as they rounded La Spezia, and there was mercy in its light.

Nicolò, riding beside him, reached out and took his hand. His eyes were blue, they were green, they were the color of the sky and the color of the sea. Hope stirred in Yusuf’s soul, that there was more life ahead of them yet, and though he did not crave stillness anymore, he was only human: he smiled at his beloved Nicolò, and he thought, he could not help it—

(please, do not let the sun die)

— _remain thou, thou art so beautiful._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! This story is set during the famous ‘Frankenstein Summer’ of 1816—otherwise known as the ‘Year Without a Summer’—when Byron and the Shelleys rented neighboring villas on Lake Geneva and collectively produced a lot of great literature. The mood of the time was fairly apocalyptic, with lots of dire predictions about the death of the sun and the end of the world; the effects of a far-off volcanic eruption were totally unknown. The terrible weather kept everyone indoors, and they passed the time by inventing ghost stories. Mary Shelley, who was only 18, came up with Frankenstein. Byron wrote a depressing poem called ‘Darkness,’ which is the inspiration for Yusuf’s vision of a “seasonless, treeless, manless, lifeless” earth. Additionally, they were all obsessed with Goethe’s Faust—though none of them had actually read it yet, because they didn’t know German. 
> 
> Byron really did travel in a (terribly impractical) replica of Napoleon’s carriage. 
> 
> Title from Percy Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound.’ 
> 
> As always, hearing from you brings me such great joy.


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